The demand for agriculture-education is now widespread; the subject is becoming "popular." All kinds of plans are being tried or discussed.
Persons do not seem to realize that we have had about one hundred years of experience in the United States in agriculture-education, and that this experience ought to point the way to success, or at least to the avoiding of serious errors. The agricultural colleges have come up through a long and difficult route, and their present success is not accidental, nor is it easy to duplicate or imitate. First and last, about every conceivable plan has been tried by them, or by others in their time or preceding them; and this experience ought to be utilized by the other institutions that are now being projected in all parts of the country.
Plans that certainly cannot succeed are now being projected. The projectors seem to proceed on the idea that it requires no background of experience to enable an institution to teach agriculture, whereas agriculture-education is the most difficult and also the most expensive of all education yet undertaken.
To teach agriculture merely by giving a new direction or vocabulary to botany, chemistry, geology, physics, and the like is not to teach agriculture at all, although it may greatly improve these subjects themselves. To put a school of agriculture in the hands of some good science-teacher in a general college faculty with the idea that he can cover the agricultural work and at the same time keep up his own department, is wholly ineffective (except temporarily) and out of character with the demands of the twentieth century (but in high-schools a good science teacher may handle the work, or an agriculture teacher may carry the science). To suppose that "agriculture" is one subject for a college course, to be sufficiently represented by a "chair," is to miss the point of modern progress. To give only laboratory and recitation courses may be better than nothing, but land-teaching, either as a part of the institution or on adjacent farms, must be incorporated with the customary school work if the best results are to be secured. To make a school farm pay for itself and for the school is impossible unless the school is a very poor or exceedingly small one; and yet this old fallacy is alive at the present day. To have a distant farm to visit and look at, in order to "apply" the "teachings" of chemistry, botany, and the like, falls far short of real agriculture instruction. To develop a "model farm" that shall be a pattern to the multitude in exact farming is an exploded notion: there are many farmers' farms that are better adapted to such purpose (the demonstration farm is the modern adaptation of the idea, and it is educationally sound).
To teach agriculture of college grade requires not only persons who know the subject, but an organization well informed on the educational administration that is required. There must be a body of experience in this line of work behind any teaching on a college plane that shall be really useful; when this body of experience does not exist, the work must necessarily grow slowly and be under the most expert direction. The presumption is still against successful agriculture work in the literary and liberal arts institutions, because such teaching demands a point of view on education that the men in these institutions are likely not to possess. Agriculture cannot be introduced in the same way that a department or chair of history or mathematics can be organized; it requires a different outlook on educational procedure, a different order of equipment and of activities, and its own type of administration.
I am much afraid that some of the newer unattached institutions, in their eagerness to make departures and to be self-sufficient, will not profit by our long development, and that the secondary schools and others may make many of the mistakes that the regular colleges of agriculture long ago have made. The presumption is against any school that expects to develop merely a local enterprise, without reference to other schools or to experience.
I am sure we all want to encourage the introduction of agriculture into all educational institutions, but we should not be misled merely by the word "agriculture"; and in the interest of good work we should be careful not to encourage any enterprise of this kind until convinced that it has been well studied and that it will be administered in the interest of rural progress.